Exploring The Game Of The Scene
The Game Of The Scene is one of the more debated improv concepts. Part of that debate has focused simply on defining what we mean by ‘the game of the scene’ and part of the debate has been about its usefulness or necessity. This episode we explore definitions of Game and hear from those who use this tool and those who don’t.
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This show features:
Bill Arnett
https://chicagoimprovstudio.com/
Brandon Gardner
https://losangeles.ucbtrainingcenter.com/
https://www.wgimprovschool.com/
Patti Styles
https://www.pattistiles.com/
Episode transcript:
This… is the Improv Chronicle podcast. I'm Lloydie.
Lloydie James Lloyd: One of the more debated improv concepts, at least in the circles that I've been in for the last decade or so, has been the game of the scene. Part of the debate has focused simply on defining what we actually mean by the game of deceit in improv. But part of it has been about its usefulness or necessity.
This episode, you're going to hear three perspectives on the subject, all different to some degree or another, as we try to unpack this concept and its relevance to our artform. We start with a man who, for his sins, taught me over 10 years ago when I was a student at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York.
Brandon Gardner: Hi, my name is Brandon Gardner and I teach improv at the UCB Training Centre, right now in L.A. and for years I taught it in New York. I also teach classes through Will Hines’ World's Greatest Improv School.
Lloydie: You were well known in UCB, certainly, for being one of the people who had taught possibly the most Level 2’s; the most 201’s, and that is the level where UCB introduced Game. So, how would you define game of the same?
Brandon: I usually give two definitions. So, the sort of simple definition is, “Game is what's funny about your scene” and then the textbook definition, which I hopefully am saying correctly is, “Game is a pattern of unusual behaviour that breaks from the pattern of your everyday life.”
Lloydie: And I mean, how do you know when you've got game in your scene then?
Brandon: Well, to a certain extent, I think you'll know based on laughs. Like a lot of improv, playing off a live audience gives you a lot of important information.
It's also something that I think the people who tend to be best at it, who seem to get it most naturally, I think, are people that have to a certain extent been playing game their whole lives without necessarily calling it that, but that are people who, when they're funny with their friends, sort of are playing game. They're sort of repeating patterns. They might think of it as something like a bit, but it is like a funny thing that they keep returning to. Or they might play a character with their friends. And if the character is in any way comedically specific, then I would say that character has a game.
So, for the most part, if your scene is funny, unless you're being incredibly witty and it's just sort of verbal gymnastics, your scene probably has a game, if it's funny,
Lloydie: How cerebral of a concept do you think it is?
Brandon: For a lot of people, I think it's maybe unfortunately cerebral, and I think that's maybe how we teach it or how I teach it, and I want it to be less cerebral. I don't think it has to be cerebral. But maybe it's also one of those things where it's cerebral when you're first learning the sort of method of it and then the idea is that you sort of let go of that. And when you're actually playing it, it shouldn't feel cerebral. I don't think when you're actually improvising, maybe when you're learning it, but not once you're playing.
Lloydie: So, at what point when you're playing, does it become less cerebral? Is it, I don't know, does it become an unconscious competence?
Brandon: A little bit, and I think it's one of those things where it doesn't happen all at once. So, it might be something where you're in a class and a scene sort of just went well {indistinct 3:57} naturally, “Well, that was fun. That was pretty funny.” And you might look back and be like, “Oh, we did have a game.” There was this idea we kept coming back to that you weren't even consciously necessarily doing at the time.
I think when I improvised now, it's a little bit of both, where there might be moments where I have sort of a cerebral or conscious observation about a game that's being played or what to do next with it, mixed with a lot of sort of instinctual or unconscious playing of game.
Lloydie: Although the UCB Theatre was birthed by some students who originally studied improv in Chicago, the concept of game has arguably been slightly less in that city. So, I made Chicago my next calling point.
Bill Arnett: My name is Bill Arnett. I run the Chicago Improv Studio in Chicago.
Lloydie: How would you define the game of the scene?
Bill: It's something that exists between the players. And it's this idea that a portion of the players have an awareness slightly outside their character's awareness. And they're seeing a pattern, a verbal pattern, a word pattern. They're seeing something a little bit larger than the context of the scene. And that's what they're playing.
I guess the opposite of a game in a scene would be a relationship scene. And in that kind of scene, the players don't really exist outside the moment. They're just in the moment, playing the moment, being true to who they are and what they are. It's when the awareness starts becoming grander and greater than just that moment that you can start to have game scenes emerge.
Lloydie: So, would you describe it as a more cerebral concept within improv?
Bill: It certainly is cerebral; you got to be able to step out a little bit of what's going on and see – again, see verbal patterns, the word patterns, see frustration patterns, especially.
You can step out too far and get a boring scene that is in no way a compelling or interesting or characters that are really flat and two dimensional, yet have wonderful wordplay, you know, congratulations, you pull that off. But it's not always rewarding.
Lloydie: It sounds like, from the way you describe it, a tightrope walk
Bill: Yeah, let's say balance beam more than tightrope. Tightrope is kind of scary and it's not that difficult. Even though it's not like balance beam is easy.
But yeah, you’ve always got the option; do I stay and play what's going on right now or do I step outside and try to find a pattern that exists in a larger sense?
I guess going for the joke is the classic step-outside moment that we talk about; when someone's in a wonderful scene and they step outside to say something funny. Not that we should all do that or that's in any way a game move, but that's just an example of what it means to step outside.
If you can step outside and see a fun verbal pattern or a frustration pattern without ruining the scene, well, then that's now you're playing the game of the scene.
Lloydie: Okay. So, now we're playing the game of the scene.
Bill and Brandon, both probably approach it slightly differently. But nonetheless, game is in their improv vocabulary, but it's not in everyone's.
Patti Stiles: Hi, I'm Patti Stiles. I'm an improviser currently living in Melbourne, Australia. I am on {indistinct 7:19} country: the unseeded lands of the {indistinct 7:22} nation.
Lloydie: How would you define the game of the season?
Patti: Well, I don't use the game of the season. So, my understanding of game of the scene is to look for patterns and then to play those patterns or enhance those patterns.
Lloydie: That's interesting. So, “Why?” almost seems a loaded question, because why not? But I mean, is there a reason why you do not use the game of the scene?
Patti: It's just not in my language, it's not the way I was taught and it's not my focus when I'm working.
Lloydie: So, where do you place your focus when you work?
Patti: On inspiring my partner, whose scene her story, is it? And answering the promises in the narrative and the promises to the audience.
Lloydie: Now, this is interesting. I wonder how much the talk of game of the scene is just semantics and the language that different improv traditions have built around themselves.
I've spoken to a number of people about; can you have a decent improv scene without a game? And needless to say, there are a spectrum of opinions on that. But many people believe that actually what they would call a game is there, but it might not necessarily be defined as a game by someone else. How do you feel about that?
Patti: I think anybody can take a label or a belief and justify it within the language of improvisation. So, if someone plays the game of the scene and that's the lens that they use when they're looking at the work, then I think they can say, “It's a pattern. It's a game. It's connection.” Like they can find different ways of explaining it. And that's fine. That's how they play it.
But my understanding of the game, as it's been explained to me, is not what I use, because in the definition that was given to me, I find it limiting in the work because I don't think there's always a game.
Lloydie: Some people certainly describe the game as the element within the scene that is funny. How would you describe the comedy that you create if you don't use game of the scene or what you would describe as game at the scene?
Patti: First, I'm not always improvising to be funny. So, when I improvise, that's not my main objective. My main objective is to tell a story.
Now, if I'm improvising in a comedy show and it's sold as a comedy show, then of course I am looking for the humour. But the humour can be verbal. The humour could be, you know, emotional change. The humour could be a change in status. It can be physical routines and breaking routines, which is more kind of clown; set the routine, find a problem, break the routine, solve the problem, go back to the routine, which someone might call a game in a language; that's fair.
But if I'm playing in an open, improvised show, then it might be comedic, it might be dramatic, it might be a combination of both. So, I don't improvise solely and only for comedy. That is not my world and that's not how I play.
Lloydie: When I spoke to Patty, I could have given that last statement a standing ovation, because despite my enjoyment of game-based improv, I love the variety and improv and the ability to explore and find new things. And I think sometimes, we lose that when we find a thing we love.
As I spoke to all three of our contributors, I felt affinity with different things that they said. One criticism of game is that it can be quite formulaic and taught in quite a formulaic way, which is something I addressed with Bill.
Bill: Well, it can be easy to teach game of the scene as kind of a flowchart, you know, A, then B, then C, do this, do that. And I appreciate why sometimes, it's easy to teach that way. But I think, you know, point out in the first strange thing that happens; that might be the classic rule in finding game or technique for finding games.
I think what that misses is that it gets players to not be in the moment. It asks them to step outside immediately and to rate the scene and compare the scene or was that line unusual? Well, it wasn't unusual enough. Well, yeah, it was unusual, but maybe it's a little taboo. And I don't want the scene to go that way.
And all that thinking has nothing to do with being in a scene and has nothing to do with being in the moment. And until the game is discovered and agreed upon, nothing to do with a playing game either.
I typically get students to always, always, always respect the moment and play the moment that they are in. Should a game emerge, please play it, have fun with it and played aggressively. But if it doesn't emerge, I don't want people wondering why they're seen as broken because there's no game on it or floundering, trying to define a game or jam one on when you've got a perfectly good moment between two characters existing without a game.
Lloydie: So, if great moments exist in scenes without games, it's surely possible to have a good scene without a game. Right? Back to Brandon Garner.
Brandon: Yes. It's funny, I had a student a few months ago, maybe, send me a link to a show she had seen online and she told me, “Watch the scene at this time period.” She's like, “I really liked it, but I don't think there was a game.” And so, I watched it and I sort of agreed with her that I also really liked it and there wasn't a strong game.
So, generally speaking, it's like, I think scenes that I like, that are funny, where I would say they probably don't have a game, are scenes where everything else that they're doing is so good. So, I would say scenes that I like that don't necessarily have a game are really well acted where the improvisers are really listening to each other and responding to each other in the moment and responding emotionally to each other when it's feels natural for the scene and surprising each other.
And, one, I might really like that and not even laugh that much. I might just enjoy it for like I would enjoy any kind of theatre. And I think the moments when it is funny, those are little moments of game for the most part. And they might just be games that they sort of play for only a moment and then move on and find another game.
And sometimes, people are really good at that. Some people can do, especially that's a longer scene, they might do a five- or six-minute two-person scene where you could say, “Oh, they played five different games in that scene.”
So, it wouldn't be one game the way you usually expect from like a two- or three-minute sketch. But most of the time I've seen a comedy, every time there's something that I think is a funny moment, I think I could explain it as, at least, a moment of game.
Lloydie: A lot of this seems tied up in semantics, but it's also, I think, a little bit more than that. Some of it may be tied up in the creation of a language that improv schools can sell. Here’s Patti Stiles.
Patti: If you actually research deeply into what {indistinct 15:09 – 10}, Johnstone Shepherd, Sill's, Campbell, what they were actually doing in their work, none of them were being formulaic. None of them said, “This is the only way.” They were all exploring ways and making discoveries and revising their work as they went. And if they discovered something new, they go, “Oh, right. Okay, we learn something new. What we knew yesterday was yesterday. Today is today.”
But when they were working, there wasn't an improv scene {indistinct 15:48} in kind of our modern-day improvisation, right. Let's understand that there's improvisation that goes way back before American, Canadian or British. And there's a little bit of arrogance in the improv community to assume that that's where it started. It didn't. It's a very ancient form. And there's a lot of cultural traditions in Latin America, in Ireland, in Asia, in the Middle East of using improvisation differently.
But in talking about these teachers and kind of the language around that, the rules that developed, the formulaic play, the “This is what you have to do”, that's not their teaching. That became language that was invented in schools and companies, which was very much about selling classes and forming identity and trying to be good. Sadly, I think improvisors oversimplify improvisation by limiting it to only one thing.
And I'm not saying any form is better than any other form, but this limitation or this confining it to only being comedy, it's kind of sad. It's like let it be what it is. And if people want to use it differently, that's cool. Let them do their thing.
But I believe that there's companies and approaches to improvisation that by controlling the definition, controlling people's opinion or perception of the work that builds individuals profiles and builds a network around a particular form.
Lloydie: Bill sees a value in the game at the scene, but he also sees it as the personal preference of the players performing.
Bill: You know, game of the scene can be a kind of a thorny issue. It's got a lot of different definitions and we just say that word and presume everybody understands it the same way that we do. And that's just not really the case. Some people kind of have a very strict definition, some people kind have a looser definition.
Ultimately, we want to have good improv scenes and they want to make sure that they have a tone and temper that we like and we appreciate and are the kind of scenes we like doing. And that could be super gamey or super not gamey. But it's valuable to learn, it's valuable to understand, because even in the most relationship-driven scene, there's always going to be an awareness as to what's going on in these people's lives. And that does require a stepping out a little bit and seeing the scene as an observer, not just as a as a player on the inside.
Lloydie: I may sound like I'm sitting on the fence here. So, apologies for the creaking wood in what I'm about to say. But I could agree with almost everything that every contributor has said in this episode. And maybe that sounds strange.
They each come from different schools of thought. And although Brandon and Bill are probably closer together in background and style, but each of those views makes up a strand of improv.
And one of the fascinating things about making this podcast is discovering the moment views diverge as well as converge. There's more than one way to approach improv, and I love the way we all care so much about it. The one of the more debated words is a word that is essentially all about playing game
Next time… on The Improv Chronicle Podcast.
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If it's something you experience or have conquered and would like to share your thoughts on, message newsdesk@improvchronicle.com.
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